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Month: December 2023

SSMS and the Default Web Browser

Published 2023-12-18 by Kevin Feasel

Erin Stellato explains why things have to be so difficult:

If you have installed SQL Server Management Studio 19.1 or higher and encountered an Internet Explorer dialog with the message “Can’t reach this page” when trying to login using Microsoft Entra authentication (previously known as Azure Active Directory authentication), this post is for you.  An example of what this error looks like is below.  If you haven’t encountered this error and have no issues invoking a web browser from SSMS, then you can stop here and move on to something else!  But if you’re interested, feel free to keep reading.

I think the decision that the tools team made here is the right one: default to using the system browser, but you can see the kind of problems that can cause some environments. It’s hard to write a tool intended to work in a large variety of environments, including highly secured ones.

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Delta Table Incremental Refresh in Power BI

Published 2023-12-18 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb shows off a bit of functionality:

One of the coolest features in Fabric is Direct Lake mode, which allows you to build Power BI reports directly on top of Delta tables in your data lake without having to wait for a semantic model to refresh. However not everyone is ready for Fabric yet so there’s also a lot of interest in the new DeltaLake.Table M function which allows Power Query (in semantic models or dataflows) to read data from Delta tables. If you currently have a serving layer – for example Synapse Serverless or Databricks SQL Warehouse – in between your existing lake house and your import mode Power BI semantic models then this new function could allow you to remove it, to reduce complexity and cut costs. This will only be a good idea, though, if refresh performance isn’t impacted and incremental refresh can be made to work well.

Click through to learn more about the performance of this operation and how it all works.

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Resource Governor and Azure SQL Managed Instance

Published 2023-12-18 by Kevin Feasel

Kendra Little has a note for us:

In Azure SQL Managed Instance, you get to use Resource Governor, even in the General Purpose tier. This is awesome.

Just make sure you execute commands in the context of the master database, or you’ll get error 40510: Statement 'ALTER RESOURCE GOVERNOR' is not supported in this version of SQL Server.

Read on for more information about this error and how to circumvent it.

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SQL Server on Linux and the Built-In Administrators Group

Published 2023-12-18 by Kevin Feasel

Andrew Pruski goes messing around:

When I first started working with SQL on Linux one of the first things I did was to remove the default the [BUILTIN\Administrators] login. This is pretty much standard practice with SQL on Windows as we don’t want administrators on the server to have automatic sysadmin rights into the SQL instance.

But this login makes no sense on Linux as there is no administrators group, so it should be dropped…right?

Andrew then goes on to show us why that’s not right. Read the whole thing.

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Password Handling in Powershell Automation Scripts

Published 2023-12-18 by Kevin Feasel

Ajay Dwivedi gives us a tip:

I have been writing automations using PowerShell for many years now. One common issue I notice with people’s code is the improper handling of passwords. In this blog, I share how to set up a Credential Manager on a SQLServer and use the same for handling passwords in automation.

To setup Credential Manager, we need to download and execute the following steps using scripts from my Github repo SQLMonitor.

One point I’d like to clarify in Ajay’s scripts is that the passwords in the database aren’t hashed. Hashing is a one-way operation, so you’d never be able to decrypt it with a passphrase. The password is encrypted and the passphrase isn’t a salt—salts are a way of making a hash unique from the plaintext to prevent multiple users with the same plaintext password from having the same salt. Encryption instead of hashing is the correct answer here because you need the plaintext of the password to perform the automated operation.

As for ENCRYPTBYPASSPHRASE(), it’s okay if you’re running SQL Server 2017 or later. For 2016 and earlier, it uses Triple DES with 128 bit key length and that’s no good.

I’d also look into the Powershell SecretStore module and possibly integrate into an existing key vault if you have one.

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Batching Text Analytics with Azure AI Services

Published 2023-12-15 by Kevin Feasel

Matt Eland tries out the TextAnalytics client:

We’ll talk about each one of these capabilities briefly as we cover the results, but at a high level what we want to do is:

  • Perform sentiment analysis to determine if the text is positive, negative, neutral, or mixed.
  • Summarize the text using abstractive summarization which summarizes the text with new text generated by a large language model (LLM).
  • Summarize the text using extractive summarization which summarizes the text by extracting key sentences or parts of sentences to convey the overall meaning.
  • Extract key phrases of interest from the text document.
  • Perform entity recognition and linked entity recognition to determine the major objects, places, people, and concepts the document discusses.
  • Recognize any personally identifiable information (PII) present in the document for potential redaction.
  • Analyze the text for healthcare specific topics such as treatment plans or medications.

Read on to see how a certain passage of text fares.

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Triggers in Postgres

Published 2023-12-15 by Kevin Feasel

Semab Tariq explains how triggers work in PostgreSQL:

In the dynamic world of relational databases, where precision and efficiency are paramount, PostgreSQL emerges as a robust solution. At the heart of its functionality lies a feature that adds a layer of intelligence and automation to database operations – Triggers.

What exactly are triggers? They are predefined actions that the database executes automatically when a specific event occurs, such as an insertion, update, or deletion of records in a table. Think of triggers as the silent guardians behind the scenes, ensuring data integrity, enforcing business rules, and automating repetitive tasks.

These trigger examples also work for SQL Server, and my advice for triggers probably would be the same between platforms: use triggers sparingly because they can cause performance problems and it can be easy to forget that they exist when you’re troubleshooting why some operation isn’t working the way you expect.

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ML Models and Data Warehouses in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2023-12-15 by Kevin Feasel

Tomaz Kastrun continues a series on Microsoft Fabric. First up is creating ML models:

Protip: Both experiments and the ML model version look similar, and you can intuitively switch between both of them. But do not get confused, as the ML Model version applies the best-selected model from the experiment and can be used for inference.

Then we switch context to data warehousing:

Today we will start exploring the Fabric Data Warehouse.

With the data lake-centric logic, the data warehouse in Fabric is built on a distributed processing engine, that enables automated scaling. The SaaS experience creates a segway to easier analysis and reporting, and at the same time gives the ability to run heavy workloads against open data format, simply by using transact SQL (T-SQL). Microsoft OneLake gives all the services to hold a single copy of data and can be consumed in a data warehouse, datalake or SQL Analytics.

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Searching for a String in a SQL Server Database

Published 2023-12-15 by Kevin Feasel

Vlad Drumea is looking for a string:

This post contains a script that I’ve written and used a few times when I’ve needed to search for a string in an entire SQL Server database.

You can find more of my scripts by checking out the SQL Server Scripts category of my blog.

As a warning, this is definitely going to be slow on larger databases. But for smaller databases, it can definitely be handy.

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